elamje

I’m always excited when Cloudflare starts offering things that I had to use other providers for because I know it will be solid.

We used Statsig at Function. It started out as 2 of us using it on one product and within 12 months, large amounts of our product copy and rollouts were driven off of it.

Statsig has client side evals so you can write rules and rollouts based on internal concepts without Statsig’s servers processing a piece of user data. Hoping Cloudflare can build a sophisticated product here so I don’t have use another product in the future!

Not only does this obviously not result in lower US prices

Maybe in Pfizer’s portfolio this is true. However, I just watched the Amazon Pharmacy pricing for GLP-1s drop substantially immediately following this. I think you may be being too black and white on claiming this categorically does not work.

Businesses will adapt pricing models, obviously this hurts Pfizer in some way, but Lilly and Novo found the new system was worth negotiating into. Like most things - when people say “always” or “never” - it’s reducing the spectrum of possibilities

Not arguing on broken internal pricing dynamics that are skewed by all sorts of gov programs and payors.

It’s about external, global pricing dynamics. The site clearly isn’t going to be able to give clean payor/pbm/gov subsidized pricing tables - that is almost an impossible exercise in our system.

What the agreement does accomplish is saying Americans will not pay $1150/mo while EU pays $400/mo while Argentina pays $120/mo.

It guarantees drugs will be greater than or equal to US pricing abroad which effectively forces pharma to find deeper profits outside of the US, or lower prices for all countries to acquire demand.

That is extremely effective. Now it’s up to a really complex group of people to figure out what that means inside our weird system of pharma/pbm/rebates/insurance/medicare.

But that’s not what trumprx is aiming to solve for right?

Can you explain from first principles how the US market gaining MFN pricing does not benefit Americans? Open to changing my mind

The situation is basically this -

Novo and Lilly spent billions making Semaglutide, Tirzepatide, and future formulations/modalities.

They are going to monetize this heavily while they have IP coverage. There is no world they will let HIMS or any compounding pharmacy of scale undercut them.

On the insurance front - expect your insurance to decline this forever unless you are at serious risk of diabetes. It would make you cost them $3-6k/yr more. Insurance premiums would rise for everyone if insurance was subsidizing this - no free lunch.

Fortunately, the prices are coming down. Amazon pharmacy has Wegovy in an auto-injector starting at $199 without insurance. And that’s delivered to your door in under 24 hrs in most major cities.

I highly recommend checking out the terms of trumprx.gov - not endorsing the entire government here, but it is actually working and quite cleverly written to ensure Americans are getting the lowest cost drugs in the world now. Historically, we subsidized R&D globally by allowing pharma to make most profits on Americans then have cheaper prices abroad. That is changing and hopefully that’s a net positive.

Where did you hear this?

I was talking to someone about this the other day. I was part of a team at NASA that developed a cooling system for the ISS and this whole premise makes no sense to me.

1. Getting things to space is incredibly expensive

2. Ingress/egress are almost always a major bottleneck - how is bandwidth cheaper in space?

3. Chips must be “Rad-hard” - that is do more error correcting from ionizing radiation - there were entire teams at NASA dedicated to special hardware for this.

4. Gravity and atmospheric pressure actually do wonders for easy cooling. Heat is not dissipated in space like we are all used to and you must burn additional energy trying to move the heat generated away from source.

5. Energy production will be cheaper from earth due to mass manufacturing of necessary components in energy systems - space energy systems need novel technology where economies of scale are lost.

Would love for someone to make the case for why it actually makes total sense, because it’s really hard to see for me!

this hides major dilution until future financings

best to treat it like an expense from the perspective of shareholders

think about how to start and maintain a better founder dynamic for the next company more than trying to course correct what you already have

you’ll be happier on the morning after you leave than you even remembered was possible

Have a friend high up at one of the “Big 3” in this space.

The entire business model is predicated on injecting themselves as the last click for attribution even when they weren’t remotely responsible for the conversion. Cool business, but can’t keep going on forever without someone catching on.

The closest software analogy I’ve heard is like passing around a callable/function with a standard interface. An LLM can call the callable and work with the returned data without needing to go back and forth between your application logic.

Do you think SpaceX or similar would be attacking this problem space if there was a business to be had here? Seems like a fun pet project that will lose money indefinitely, but love seeing small teams do big things!

100%

Nearly 10 years ago, I was at a Spotify recruiting event and they told us how they did embeddings at the time.

They took all user generated playlists and projected the songs into vectors where songs that appear together on playlists are closer and songs that appear less often are farther.

It’s likely changed a lot since then, but it seemed like a pretty straightforward clustering system at the time.

$1,000/mo in a low income area of Dallas is a lot of money. Going from a $700/mo to a $1,700/mo apartment in Dallas is luxury. Not sure you're seeing this one clearly....

Massively changed my life trajectory.

I was working on my first "startup" (if you want to call it that) and wasn't getting traction. The owner of a software consulting firm found me on Hacker News and brought me in as his first employee on a massive contract. We grew the team substantially, made great money and that lead to doing a real startup after. And then another. All from a post I made on a hiring thread.

Most people don’t know that there are species that can, e.g. drop their metabolic rate down to .01% of baseline to survive without water or food for 30 yrs. Or survive in high radiation environments, or high pressure and temperature environments. More people should know that there is genetic precedent for crazy phenotypes that could theoretically extend to other species in the future.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade

Should have maintained a python interoperable runtime. Less and less people use JVM languages for things like web apps, data eng, data science, ML, etc.

This is awesome. I am highly interested in the BioTech space and happened to work with electro-wetting for zero gravity space applications almost 10 years ago!

This is such a cool application of the tech. Everything is accelerating in biotech.

We were using electro-wetting as a low power heat pipe on the Space Station, since heat doesn’t dissipate the same way there as it does on Earth. The tech I built with some engineers used these tiny DC to DC high voltage transformers that would step up the voltage from the 18V power supply to something like 450V on the circuit board to enable the electro-wetting heat pipes to move water droplets.

Would love to chat sometime if you are ever interested.

For reference, our very scrappy POC for the space station: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190006008/downloads/20...

I run a bunch of blogs from a single Django app with a CMS, SQLite, and extremely optimized SEO hacks.

It’s the perfect use case, light on writes, super heavy on reads. Almost as fast as any caching solution would be, except it’s actually running live SQL queries on the data. I am not sure why more people don’t opt for this to start.

Growth hacking, marketing, and sales for SMBs and solo-preneurs.

Think highly paid freelancers (we find opportunities for them) and blue-collar service companies (they want more leads, but can't afford a high talent growth team).

https://smashamp.com - we currently serve clients in an agency capacity and are building tools/SaaS to do all of this in a self-serve fashion.

The most exciting frontier we are positioning ourselves for is LLM growth hacking, i.e. AI SEO. But, our current company/product is still going to be living in agency/SaaS mode for years to come.

I worked on this in 2018/19. It's a really hard problem, and the only people I've found doing it at scale is a small Norwegian company called https://piql.no. They encode large files into film and store it in the Arctic World Archive - and they did GitHub's Arctic Code Vault.

DNA storage is interesting, though can be damaged by radiation. Would love to see where you land with this project - it's one of the few cases where crypto may actually be the only real digital solution.

Function Health | Technical Product Managers and Software Engineers | Austin or Remote | https://functionhealth.com

We are the fastest growing health membership in the US right now. We're on a wild ride of insane growth from basically $0 to tens of millions in revenue over the last year. Beyond revenue, we went from a few hundred subscribing members to tens of thousands. All of that and we're still in Beta. Our team is intense and strong. I'm hiring TPMs to join my team as the driving force of our engineering and product org. You'll work across eng, design, marketing, and operations and be the glue that ties all of our pillars together. Our roadmap has amazing applications of AI, wearables, health data, and more. I struggle to think of a product more interesting or impactful to work on.....and you'd be joining at the perfect time to scale it all up with us. It's not easy, but you'll understand how special the team is after you give us a shout.

Apply here: https://function-health.breezy.hr or DM me on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elamjohn/

Treating it declaratively is what I initially thought it would be, but what happens when the user needs to tweak the layout for some unique requirement? My guess is what would happen is it would force them to completely eject from your declarative approach, similar to how if you build software on low-code tools, and need to tweak something, you typically have to completely eject. The low-code thing has no understanding to render your custom thing.

Idk maybe this can be solved, but seems problematic to describe layouts like SQL then rely on query planners to deliver the perfect execution.

This is an amazing concept.

You still need heavy EE understanding to know how to develop PCBs, so it’s not going to turn every software engineer into a PCB pro, but it could totally change the game for EEs that can learn to code.

This is definitely a step in the right direction though and I’m wondering how much of a PCB can be represented in an abstract syntax tree or something similar. Are there edge cases, or could you completely describe a PCB layout using code?

Thanks for the heads up!

Function Health | Technical Product Managers, React Native Lead | Austin or Remote | https://functionhealth.com

We are the fastest growing health membership in the US right now.

We're on a wild ride of insane growth from basically $0 to tens of millions in revenue over the last year. Beyond revenue, we went from a few hundred subscribing members to tens of thousands. All of that and we're still in Beta.

Our team is intense and strong. I'm hiring TPMs to join my team as the driving force of our engineering and product org. You'll work across eng, design, marketing, and operations and be the glue that ties all of our pillars together.

Our roadmap has amazing applications of AI, wearables, health data, and more. I struggle to think of a product more interesting or impactful to work on.....and you'd be joining at the perfect time to scale it all up with us. It's not easy, but you'll understand how special the team is after you give us a shout.

Apply here: https://function-health.breezy.hr or DM me on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elamjohn/

You’re in a bubble if you believe this. On a personal level sure, but my middle aged and old family members use it for everything and they are the last ones to understand internet things. They have 0 complaints, though I personally have my own issues with listing quality and review growth hacking.

Hey Andrew!

Thanks for sharing all the resources and giving me guidance a few years ago. Still very thankful for a few of your posts and pointing me to read Venture Deals, all made me a much better CTO and founder. Hope your current journey is going great!